….and getting used to another Operating System.
About a month and a half ago, my old (reeaally old) Sony Vaio decided to finally quit on me. After seeing my transition from dial-up to DSL, surviving years of university work, and all the downloads from music to star trek icons plus the near close encounters with viruses, my Vaio decided enough was enough.
I can’t say I was surprised when it finally died. I had been anticipating it for quite some time and started backing up my data on the new USB flash drive. I also began deleting unnecessary programs, and files from the Vaio, a task I should of done long before.
Around the same time that the computer died on me, I was starting a new programming project. Having no computer meant the project would be left at a standstill. Checking email and blogs now became an inconvenience; I was reduced to checking it at work (The library workers were all on strike which made it impossible to check at the library and I didn’t want to spend money at the internet cafe).
I began to look for “Back to School” deals on Laptops. I decided that a laptop would give me the portability that I always wanted and could easily be my desktop replacement. I was just ecstatic to find a good laptop on sale with the specifications that I needed. The details of purchasing it and bringing it home will have to be left out for now, but believe me it was an adventure.
It felt fantastic to finally have a brand new computer! I did, however, have a few concerns regarding it’s set-up and how that would affect my programs. You see, if it wasn’t able to run with Visual Studio 2005, then my main reason for purchasing it would no longer exist, leaving me with a somewhat useless machine that would probably end up being something I just check email and facebook with.
To this day, I am still prompted to download a few updates to my programs so can run with Vista. I was so used to XP, and don’t know why every new laptop has to run Vista. Now, I have to remember to save my word documents to .doc instead of .docx so others can access my files, something I never had to do before. But overall, it is working fine with Visual Studio 2005, for my purposes at least. I know there are already some problems it detected with the other languages(like SQL), but C++ is working okay. There is an update that I recently installed for Visual Studio that can be found here.
My new laptop is slowly living up to it’s worth giving me the tool I need to continue my project(s) and of course something to check email with 
